Poetry / Nance Van Winckel
:: Ding Her Children ::
:: He Bit ::
:: The Lad Who Went to the North Wind ::
From the writer
:: Account ::
I’ve been “lifting out” and recombining in these erasures to make whole new visual poems from source material—e.g., two of my own early poems in “Ding Her Children,” a page from The Velveteen Rabbit in “He Bit” and old Norse tales in “The Lad Who Went to the North Wind.” I alter the graphics and experiment to see if I can get the “poetic” text to combine, even alchemize, with the visual elements. I try for junctures of disparate linguistic and graphic elements, hoping these may allow for what Gertrude Stein called “open feeling,” a state of “slowed, empathic receptivity.”
Nance Van Winckel’s fifth book of fiction is Ever Yrs. (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), a novel in the form of a scrapbook; her eighth book of poems is Our Foreigner (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017), winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series. A book of visual poetry entitled Book of No Ledge appeared in 2016 with Pleiades Press. The recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, POETRY, and Prairie Schooner, she has new poems in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Field, Poetry Northwest, and Gettysburg Review. She is on the MFA faculties of Vermont College of Fine Arts and Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers.